We happen to be humans who loved technology and embrace it wholeheartedly. But it was always clear things would be different if we were male. Some of us identified as feminists before we came to this industry. Some of us only began to understand the relevance of feminism as we sought to understand what’s been happening to us. Some of us felt that we didn’t need the programs and events geared specifically towards women— until the bad stuff started happening to us. We thought they did more harm than help by calling attention to our gender, and we wondered
what others were complaining about. It was hard to see until we suffered also. Others, still, speak very much of feminist ideals and action but are afraid to identify with the word ‘feminist’ because they fear alienation from their peers, both in work and also in their social lives. The last thing we want is for people reading this to be put on the defensive.
But maybe you thought because we weren’t as loud, that this stuff doesn’t happen to us. We’ve been harassed on mailing lists and called ‘whore’/‘cunt’ without any action being taken against aggressors. We get asked about our relationships at interviews, and we each have tales of being groped at public events. We’ve been put in the uncomfortable situation of having men attempt to turn business meetings into dates. We’ve found casual assumptions that point at more significant issues. We’ve witnessed the few female co-workers and male allies we’ve had get fired or bullied into leaving — at companies that had so few of them to begin with. We’re constantly asked ‘if you write any code” when speaking about technical topics and giving technical presentations, de-
spite just having given a talk on writing code. We’ve been harassed at these same conferences in person and online about our gender, looks, and technical expertise. We get asked if we’re the event planner or executive assistant on a regular basis. We regularly receive creepy, rapey e-mails where men describe what a perfect wife we would be and exactly how we should expect to be subjugated. Sometimes there are angry e-mails that threaten us to leave the industry, because ‘it doesn’t need anymore c**ts ruining it’.
W E C A N D O I T
The basic assumption shared by all feminists is that women suffer certain injustices on account of their sex. Feminists stress the importance of gender divisions in society and it portrays these divisions as working to the overall advantage of men. Although feminists are united with their common desire for sexual justice and their concern for women’s welfare, there is a range spectrum of feminist views. Liberal feminism focuses on equal rights; radical feminism focuses on the sex war and separatism (they see patriarchy as built into the structure of society); Marxist/socialists feminism focuses on the impact of capitalism while black feminists focus on racism and ethnicity. Two of the more famous proponents of feminism are: Ann Oakley, a British sociologist and writer, born 1944. Her works include ‘Women Confined: Towards a sociology of childbirth.’(1980) and ‘Who’s afraid of Feminism?’ (1997). Her father was a social policy theorist.
“Sexism involves the subordination of women by men... While some women may dislike men intensely and treat them unfairly and while some women may be equally guilty of prejudice toward other women, the balance of power throughout most, if not all, of recorded history has allowed men to subordinate women in order to maintain their own privilege. Thus, an individual woman who treats men or women unfairly simply because of their gender may be called prejudiced and may be criticized as unjust, but she cannot be guilty of sexism.”
“The unconscious, taken-for-granted, unquestioned, unexamined, and unchallenged acceptance of the belief that the world as it looked to men was the only world, that the way of dealing with it that men had created was the only way, that the values men had evolved were the only ones, that the way sex looked to men was the only way it could look to anyone, that what men thought women were like was the only way to think about women.”
EDITORIAL BY KATHERINE CHANGOLUISA